Syracuse’s can’t-miss night exposes more cracks in North Carolina’s facade
There was still a minute to go when the Syracuse students started pouring out of the bleachers and onto the wide pathways that surround this basketball court floating on a football field, a heaving, impatient mass. They had to wait a long minute, a full 10 minutes in real time, before they finally got their chance to sprint onto the court and celebrate the Orange’s biggest victory of the season on Tuesday night.
Hubert Davis’ final instruction to his team was to skip the handshakes and flee to the locker room, beckoning his players toward him as time expired on an 86-79 loss, North Carolina’s third in five games after jumping out to a 9-0 start in the ACC.
The celebration that raged on behind them was a very loud reminder that North Carolina, thanks to the spot it staked out in the first half of the conference season, is going to get everyone’s best shot the rest of the way — even if, to a degree, UNC gets everyone’s best shot anyway, merely by virtue of being UNC.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone having a better shot than this.
Syracuse couldn’t miss.
J.J. Starling’s 40-foot heave, off the glass, when he thought the shot clock was expiring, sort of summed up the night. That erased North Carolina’s final lead of the game, with 6:45 to go, and was the enduring representation of the best shooting night by any opponent against the Tar Heels in nine years. The Orange shot 63% from the field to pick up its first win over North Carolina since 2021.
“Usually teams aren’t hitting those shots at a high rate,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said, “but today they were all going in. At the end of the day, we’re living with those shots.”
It wasn’t so much that the Tar Heels couldn’t keep up — their offensive performance was actually among the top seven of their season in terms of efficiency, even with R.J. Davis getting off to a slow start and Bacot dealing with a balky knee. But they never found an answer for Starling (23 points) or Judah Mintz (25), who not only confounded North Carolina on ball screens but also made the kind of shots the Tar Heels would normally be happy to allow, leaning 3-pointers and contested mid-range jumpers.
“A lot of those were tough shots, but we just have to find ways to get stops,” North Carolina’s Cormac Ryan said. “You can howl at the moon about banked shots and fadeaways, but at the end of the day it comes down to getting stops. That’s what we need to do, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Either way, there are certainly growing cracks in the UNC facade. The loss at Georgia Tech, which also featured a banked-in prayer. The home loss to Clemson, only the second ever in Chapel Hill. A near-miss in Miami, when North Carolina had to hang on at the bitter end as everything seemed on the verge of slipping away.
And this one, when the Tar Heels couldn’t outshoot the Orange in a shootout and couldn’t get enough stops to get out in transition, even with Seth Trimble back and available, then saw whatever chances they had to close the gap late wither in a wave of turnovers, four in the final two minutes of a two-possession game.
The win over Duke, in the middle of all that, has almost become an afterthought.
“We’re right in the games. It’s not like we’re down 20,” R.J. Davis said. “We’re chipping away, possession by possession and we’re in the game. So we have to figure out how to execute better toward the end of the game.”
There are only two road games left, but they’re the toughest the ACC has to offer: Virginia and Duke. And there’s not a lot about North Carolina right now that suggests the Tar Heels are up for the challenge the way they would have been a month ago.
All of which suggests the Tar Heels have arrived at a crossroads as they depart upstate New York. Their defense and late-game execution have been found variously wanting in recent days. Frustration is starting to seep in through the cracks. In the space of three Tuesdays, their dominant position atop the ACC has evaporated.
Great teams find a way to push through difficult times, to meet the challenge of an opponent leaving everything on the floor. The merely good are left behind. North Carolina, starting with Virginia Tech on Saturday, can still choose its own adventure. But the options are starting to narrow.
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This story was originally published February 13, 2024 at 10:47 PM with the headline "Syracuse’s can’t-miss night exposes more cracks in North Carolina’s facade."
